Canada's Scientific Myopia
Canada can boast that it educates, trains and employs the services of some of the finest scientific minds in the world. Unfortunately, it can also groan that some of those fine scientific minds turn their attention elsewhere in the world to find employment in other countries which seriously fund scientific investigation. Canada has never invested as much of its funding potentials in research and innovation as it should for a wealthy country proud of the quality of its university graduates.
And we most certainly haven't been doing so well lately, either. At a time when, more than ever, a country's forward-looking investitures in the future of science and technology earmarks them as progressive or laggards. Canada is definitely in the laggard field. And it needn't be that way. We have the venerable research institutions, government- and university-allied, and the scientific expertise, along with a reputation for some fairly world-renowned successes.
Moreover, the studies are there to demonstrate that scientific research is no mere exercise of academic prowess. Research and development are crucial to a country's economy and advance into the future. Canada's two percent of GDP investment in science and technology produced between 150,000 and 200,000 jobs according to a 1999 study. Research contributes greatly to increased productivity in many areas. In Ottawa alone a $1-billion investment in 2006 was spent to help fuel the economy.
Now, with the latest budget brought down by the Government of Canada, meant to stimulate the economy at a time of great financial insecurity brought about by the global economic collapse, no funding has been made available for the salaries of the technicians and scientific investigators we need to further enhance our scientific and technological capabilities and create additional employment. On the other hand, the federal and Ontario governments are seriously considering handing over $6-billion tax dollars to bankruptcy-headed General Motors and Chrysler.
Instead, institutions like the National Research Council are told to tighten their belts, and they've laid off the very experts we require to keep us competitive. The funding bodies for research in universities; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research have been allocated no additional government funding in the new stimulus budget.
Instead they've been informed they're expected to cut their budgets substantially. As a result, "well below 20% of grant applicants" for research in academia is being funded. Ironically what this government has undertaken is to generously fund the infrastructure, the buildings, the equipment. But not the experiments, the research, nor those who have the expertise and the interest in conducting them. What kind of inane sense does that represent?
Government claims it has poured funding into specific research projects, including additional funding for innovation and the centres of commercialization-research excellence: "Every single budget this government put forward has significantly increased funding to the science and technology sector. ...We are supporting the places to do research, we are supporting researchers and we are supporting quality research."
True that may be, but perhaps it is also true that insufficient focus on overall scientific endeavour and research is occurring, with too great a focus on a targeted immediate return in advanced technologies and not enough on the potentials for feed-back in the future. There are huge funding gaps also for example, where Arctic research programs have been wanting in their support, and where pure research overall is being abandoned.
Canada, among the advanced industrialized countries, has a low level of private-sector research; too many of our great corporations are multinationals, and they invest research funding primarily where their headquarters are situated. The simple fact of the matter is, research is hugely dependent on government in this country, and Canada's research and development investment has declined significantly over the past five years.
As a wealthy, technologically advanced country we need to do better than this.
And we most certainly haven't been doing so well lately, either. At a time when, more than ever, a country's forward-looking investitures in the future of science and technology earmarks them as progressive or laggards. Canada is definitely in the laggard field. And it needn't be that way. We have the venerable research institutions, government- and university-allied, and the scientific expertise, along with a reputation for some fairly world-renowned successes.
Moreover, the studies are there to demonstrate that scientific research is no mere exercise of academic prowess. Research and development are crucial to a country's economy and advance into the future. Canada's two percent of GDP investment in science and technology produced between 150,000 and 200,000 jobs according to a 1999 study. Research contributes greatly to increased productivity in many areas. In Ottawa alone a $1-billion investment in 2006 was spent to help fuel the economy.
Now, with the latest budget brought down by the Government of Canada, meant to stimulate the economy at a time of great financial insecurity brought about by the global economic collapse, no funding has been made available for the salaries of the technicians and scientific investigators we need to further enhance our scientific and technological capabilities and create additional employment. On the other hand, the federal and Ontario governments are seriously considering handing over $6-billion tax dollars to bankruptcy-headed General Motors and Chrysler.
Instead, institutions like the National Research Council are told to tighten their belts, and they've laid off the very experts we require to keep us competitive. The funding bodies for research in universities; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research have been allocated no additional government funding in the new stimulus budget.
Instead they've been informed they're expected to cut their budgets substantially. As a result, "well below 20% of grant applicants" for research in academia is being funded. Ironically what this government has undertaken is to generously fund the infrastructure, the buildings, the equipment. But not the experiments, the research, nor those who have the expertise and the interest in conducting them. What kind of inane sense does that represent?
Government claims it has poured funding into specific research projects, including additional funding for innovation and the centres of commercialization-research excellence: "Every single budget this government put forward has significantly increased funding to the science and technology sector. ...We are supporting the places to do research, we are supporting researchers and we are supporting quality research."
True that may be, but perhaps it is also true that insufficient focus on overall scientific endeavour and research is occurring, with too great a focus on a targeted immediate return in advanced technologies and not enough on the potentials for feed-back in the future. There are huge funding gaps also for example, where Arctic research programs have been wanting in their support, and where pure research overall is being abandoned.
Canada, among the advanced industrialized countries, has a low level of private-sector research; too many of our great corporations are multinationals, and they invest research funding primarily where their headquarters are situated. The simple fact of the matter is, research is hugely dependent on government in this country, and Canada's research and development investment has declined significantly over the past five years.
As a wealthy, technologically advanced country we need to do better than this.
Labels: Canada, Environment, Science
posted by Pieface @ 6:11 PM
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